The present invention generally relates to magnetic disk storage technology and, more paricularly, to the evaluation, measuring and testing of the properties of head/disk interfaces.
The characteristics of the head/disk interface play an important part for the lifetime of the storage system. Until now, forecasts on the lifetime of the system had been possible only on the basis of lengthy tests which regularly ended in the destruction of the parts tested. To give an example: start/stop tests have been repeatedly carried out until the breakdown of the system, which on an average took 200 hours.
Of considerable importance is the nature and quality of the surfaces which slide on each other, i.e. of the disk on the one hand and the rail of the slider carrying the head on the other. Up to now there did not exist any measuring methods for the substantially precise and useful determination of the quality of these surfaces. The quality of the interface has been proved to be determined by the quantity and quality of a lube used. However, until now the connections between slider flight characteristics and lube could not be measured adequately.
For a general introduction to disk storage technology reference may be had to the booklet "Disk Storage Technology" of International Business machines, 1980. In this booklet, two-rail sliders are described, for instance, on pp. 8 and 13. Such sliders with thin film heads are also described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,218,715 and in IBM TDB, December 1983, pp. 3364 and 3365.
Further, a magnetic head suspension mount apparatus is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,167,765.